Little Essays of Love and Virtue Part 5

The outcry about "Race-Suicide" is so far away from the real facts of life that it is not easy to take it seriously, however solemn one's natural temperament may be. We are concerned with people who arrogantly claim to direct the moral affairs of the world, even in the most intimately private matters, and who are yet ignorant of the most elementary facts of the world, unable to think, not even able to count! We can only greet them with a smile. But this question has, nevertheless, a genuinely serious aspect, and I should be sorry even to touch on the question of birth-control in relation to "Race-Suicide" without making that serious aspect clear.

"Race-Suicide," we know, has no existence. Not only is the race as a whole increasing in number, especially its White branches, but even among the separate national groups there is not even one civilised people anywhere in the world that is decreasing in number. On the contrary they are all, even France, increasing at a more or less rapid rate. In England and Wales, for example, where the birth-rate has steadily fallen during the last forty years from 36 to 23 (I disregard the abnormal rates of War-time) the population is still increasing, and even if the present falls in birth-rate and death-rate continue, it will for years still go on increasing by an excess of over 1,000 births a day. When we realise that this is merely what goes on in one corner of the world and must be multiplied enormously to represent the whole, we shall find it impossible even to conceive the prodigious flow of excess babies which is being constantly poured over the earth. If we are capable of realising all the problems which thereby arise we must be forced to ask ourselves: _Is this state of things desirable_?

"Be ye fruitful and multiply." That command was, according to the old story, delivered to a world inhabited by eight people. It has been handed down to a world in which it has long been ridiculously out of place, and has become merely the excuse for criminal recklessness among a race which has chosen to forget that the command was qualified by a solemn admonition: "At the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother, will I require the life of man." The high birth-rate has meant a vast slaughter of infants, it has meant, moreover, a perpetual oppression of the workers, disease, starvation, and death among the adult population; it has meant, further, a blood-thirsty economic compet.i.tion, militarism, warfare. It has meant that all civilisation has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution, and the human race has gone on lightly dancing there, striving to forget that ancient warning from a soul of things even deeper than the voice of Jehovah: "At the hand of man will I require the life of man." Men have recklessly followed the Will o' the Wisp which represented mere multiplication of their inefficient selves as the ideal of progress, quant.i.ty before quality, the notion that in an orgy of universal procreation could consist the highest good of humanity.

The Great War, that is scarcely yet merged into an only less war-like Peace, has brought at least the small compensation that it has led men to look in the face this insane ideal of human progress. We see to-day what has come of it, and the further evils yet to come of it are being embodied beneath our eyes. So that at last the voice of Jehovah has here and there been faintly heard, even where nowadays we had grown least accustomed to hear it, in the Churches. It is Dr. Inge, the Dean of London's Cathedral of St. Paul's, a distinguished Churchman and at the same time a foremost champion of eugenics, who lately expressed the hope that the world, especially the European world, would one day realise the advantages of a stationary population.[25] Such a recognition, such an aspiration, indicates that a new hope is dawning on the world's horizon, and a higher ideal growing within the human soul. The mad compet.i.tion of the industrial world during the past century, with the sordid gloom and wretchedness of it for all who were able to see beneath the surface, has shown for ever what comes of the effort to produce a growing population by high birth-rates in peace-time. The Great War of a later day has shown, let us hope in an equally decisive manner, what comes to a world where men have been for long generations produced so copiously and so cheaply that it is natural to regard them as only fit to sweep off the earth with machine guns. And the whole world of to-day--with its starving millions struggling in vain to feed themselves, with most of its natural beauty swept away by the ravages of man, and many of its most exquisite animals finally exterminated--is likely to become merely the monument to an ideal that failed. It was time, however late in the day, for a return to common-sense. It was time to realise that the ideal of mere propagation could lead us nowhere but to destruction. On that level we cannot compete even with the lowest of organised things, not even with the bacteria, which in number and in rapidity of multiplication are inconceivable to us.

"All hope abandon, ye that enter here" is written over the portal of this path of "Progress."

[25] This has long been recognised by men of science. Even anyone with the slightest knowledge of biology, Professor Bateson remarked in a British a.s.sociation Presidential address in 1914, is aware that a population need not be declining because it is not increasing; "in normal stable conditions population is stationary." Major Leonard Darwin, the thoughtful and cautious President of the Eugenics Education Society, has lately stated his considered belief ("Population and Civilisation," _Economic Journal_, June, 1921) that increase in numbers means, ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with consequent lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under existing conditions, involves the production of a smaller proportion of men of ability; and, further, a depreciation of our traditions; he concludes that, whatever element in civilisation we regard--wealth, or stock, or traditions--"any increase in the population _such as that now taking place_ will be accompanied by a lowering in the standard of our civilisation."

There are definite reasons why real progress in the supreme tasks of civilisation can best be made by a more or less stationary population, whether the population is large or small, and it need scarcely be added that, so far as the history of mankind is yet legible, the great advances in civilisation have been made by small, even very small populations.

Where the population is rapidly growing, even if it is growing under the favourable conditions that hardly ever accompany such growth, all its energy is absorbed in adjusting its perpetually shifting equilibrium. It cannot succeed in securing the right conditions of growth, because its growth is never ceasing to demand new conditions. The structure of its civilisation never rises above the foundations because these foundations have perpetually to be laid afresh, and there is never time to get further. It is a process, moreover, accompanied by unending friction and disorder, by strains and stresses of all kinds, which are fatal to any full, harmonious, and democratic civilisation. The "population question,"

with the endlessly mischievous readjustment it demands, must be eliminated before the great House of Life can be built up on a strong solid human foundation, to lift its soaring pinnacles towards the skies. That is what many bitter experiences are beginning to teach us. In the future we are likely to be much less concerned about "race-suicide," though we can never be too concerned about race-murder.

When we think, however, of the desirability of a more or less stationary population, in order to insure real social progress, as distinct from that vain struggle of meaningless movement to and fro which the history of the past reveals, we have to be clear in our minds that it may be far from desirable that the present overgrown population of the world should be stationary. That might indeed be better than further increase in numbers, it would arrest the growth of our present evils; it might open the way to methods by which they would be diminished or eliminated. But the process would be infinitely difficult, and almost infinitely slow, as we may easily realise when we consider that, with a population even smaller than at present, the human race has not only ravished the world's beauty almost out of existence, but so ravaged its own vital spirit that, as was found with some consternation during the Great War, a large proportion of the male population of every country is unfit for military service.

So often we hear it a.s.sumed, or even a.s.serted, that greatness means quant.i.ty, so that to look forward to the replacement of the present teeming insignificant human myriads by a rarer and more truly greater race is to be a pessimist! Oh, these "optimists"! To revel in a world which more and more closely resembles all that the poets ever imagined of h.e.l.l, is to be an "optimist"! One wonders how it is that in no brief moment of lucidity it occurs to these people that the lower we descend in the scale of life the greater the quant.i.ty in a species and the poorer the quality, so that to reach what such people should really regard as the world's period of supreme greatness in life we must go back to the days, before animal life appeared, when the earth was merely a teeming ma.s.s of bacteria.[26]

[26] See, for instance, H.F. Osborn, _The Origin and Evolution of Life_, 1918, Chapter III.

To-day, we are often told, the majority of human beings belong either to the Undesired Cla.s.s or the Undesirable Cla.s.s. To realise that this is so, we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the cities--whichever they may be--wherein dwell the highest products of our civilisation. In the better cla.s.s quarters it is indeed the Undesirable Cla.s.s that seems to predominate, and in the poor quarters, the Undesired.

Yet, viewing our species as a whole, the two cla.s.ses may be seen to walk hand in hand along the same road, and in proportion as our n.o.bler instincts germinate and develop, we must doubtless admit that it ought to be our active aim to make that road for both of them--socially though not individually--the Road to Destruction.

To stem the devastating tide of human procreativeness, however, easy as it may seem in theory, is by no means so easy as some think, especially as those think who believe that the human race stands on the brink of suicide. For there is this about it that we must never forget: the majority of those born to-day die before their time, so that by diminishing the production of the unfit, as well as by the progressive improvement of the environment that automatically accompanies such diminution, we may make an imposing difference in the appearance of the birth-rate, whilst yet the population goes on increasing rapidly, probably even more rapidly than before. It needs a most radical and thorough attack on the birth-rate before we can make any real impression on the rate of increase of the population, to say nothing of its real reduction. There is still an arduous road before us.

True it is that we have two opposing schools of thought which both say that we need not, or that we cannot, make any difference by our efforts to regulate the earth's human population. According to one view the development of population, together with the necessity for war which is inextricably mixed up with a developing population, cannot be effected without, as one champion of the doctrine is pleased to put it, "shattering both the structure of Euclidean s.p.a.ce and the psychological laws upon which the existence of self-consciousness and human society are conditional."[27] In simpler words, populations tend to become too large for their territories, so that war ensues, and birth-control can do nothing because "it is doubtful whether a group in the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness can deliberately stop its own growth." The other school proclaims human impotence on exactly opposite grounds. There is not the slightest reason, it declares, to believe that birth-control has had any but a completely negligible influence on population. This is a natural process and fertility is automatically adjusted to the death-rate.

Whenever a population reaches a certain stage of civilisation and nervous development its procreativeness, quite apart from any effort of the will, tends to diminish. The seeming effect of birth-control is illusory. It is Nature, not human effort, which is at work.[28]

[27] B.A.G. Fuller, "The Mechanical Basis of War," _Hibbert Journal_, 1921.

[28] Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (_Lancet_, 10 Aug. 1912) argued that the fall of the birth-rate, as also that of the death-rate, has been largely effected by natural causes, independent of man's action.

Mr. G. Udney Yule (_The Fall in the Birth-rate_, 1920) also believes that birth-control counts for little, the chief factor being natural fluctuations, probably of economic nature. Recently Mr. C.E. Pell, in his book, _The Law of Births and Deaths_ (1921), has made a more elaborate and systematic attempt to show that the rise and fall of the birth-rate has. .h.i.therto been independent of human effort.

These two opposing councils of despair, each proclaiming, though in a contrary sense, the vanity of human wishes in the matter of procreation, might well, some may think, be left to neutralise each other and evaporate in air. But it seems worth while to point out that, with proper limitations and qualifications, there is an element of truth in each of them, while, without such limitations and qualifications, both are alike obviously absurd and wrong-headed. Undoubtedly, as the one school holds, in certain stages of civilisation, even at a fairly advanced stage, nations tend to break out over their frontiers with resulting war; but the period when they reach "the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness" is exactly the period when the birth-rate begins to decline, and the population, deliberately or instinctively, controls its own increase. That has, for instance, been the history of France since the great expansion of population, roughly a.s.sociated with the Napoleonic epopee,--which doubtless covered a web of causes, sanitary, political, industrial, favourable to a real numerical increase of the nation--had died down slowly to the level we witness to-day.[29] Similarly, with regard to the opposing school, we must undoubtedly accept a natural fall in the birth-rate with a rising civilisation; that has always been visible in highly civilised individual couples, and it is an easily ascertainable zoological fact that throughout the evolution of life procreativeness has decreased with the increased development of species. We may agree that a natural factor comes into the recent fall in the human birth-rate. But to argue that because a natural decline in birth-rate is the essential factor in the slowing down of procreative activity with all higher evolution, therefore deliberate birth-control counts for nothing, since exactly the same result follows when voluntary prevention is adopted and when it is not, seems highly absurd. We must at least admit that voluntary birth-control is an important contributory cause, in some sense indeed, of supreme importance, because it is within man's own power and because man is thus enabled to guide and mould processes of Nature which might otherwise work disastrously. How disastrously is shown by the history of Europe, and in a notable degree France, during the four or five centuries preceding the end of the eighteenth century when various new influences began to operate. During all these centuries there was undoubtedly a very high birth-rate, yet infant mortality, war, famine, insanitation, contagious diseases of many and virulent kinds, tended, as far as we can see, to keep the population almost or quite stationary,[30] and so ruinous a method of maintaining a stationary population necessarily used up most of the energy which might otherwise have been available for social progress, although the stationary population, even thus maintained, still placed France at the head of European civilisation. The more firmly we believe that the diminution of the population is a natural process, the more strenuously, surely, we ought to guide it, so that it shall work without friction, and, so far as possible, tend to eliminate the undesirable stocks of man and preserve the desirable. Clearly, the theory itself calls for much effort, since it is obvious that along natural lines the decline, if it is the result of high evolution, will affect the fit more easily than the unfit.

[29] The reader may point to the renewal of Militarism and Imperialism in France since the Great War. That, however, has been an artificial product (in so far as it exists among the people themselves) directly fostered from outside by the policy of England and the United States, just as the same spirit in Germany before the war, in the face of a falling birth-rate, was artificially fostered from above by a military and Imperialistic caste.

[30] See especially Math.o.r.ez, _Histoire de la Formation de la Population Francaise_, Vol. I, 1920, _Les etrangers en France_. The fecundity of French families, even among the aristocracy, till towards the end of the eighteenth century, was fabulous; in the third quarter of the seventeenth century the average number of children was five in Paris.

But the mortality was extremely high; under the age of sixteen, Math.o.r.ez estimates, it was 51 per cent., and infant mortality was terrible in all cla.s.ses, small-pox being specially fatal. Then there were the various diseases termed plagues, with famine sometimes added, while war, emigration, and religious celibacy all counteracted the excessive fecundity, so that from the thirteenth century to the third quarter of the eighteenth the population seems to have been stationary, about twenty-two millions. Then the size of the family fell in Paris to 3.9 and in France generally to 4.3, while also there were fewer marriages.

Therewith there was an increase of prosperity.

Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the matter, no reason whatever to quarrel with that conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all cla.s.ses of human society in all parts of the world, and ever more widely leading to practical action, that the welfare of the individual, the family, the community, and the race is bound up with the purposive and deliberate practice of birth-control, whether we advocate that policy on the ground that we are thereby furthering Nature, or on the opposite, and no doubt equally excellent, ground that we are thereby correcting Nature.

Along this road, as along any other road, we shall not reach Utopia; and since the Utopia of every person who possesses one is unique that perhaps need not be regretted. We shall not even, within any measurable period of time, reach a sanely free and human life fit to satisfy quite moderate aspirations. The wise birth-controller will not (like the deliciously absurd suffragette of old-time) imagine that birth-control for all means a New Heaven and a New Earth, but will, rather, appreciate the delightful irony of the Biblical legend which represented a world with only four people in it, yet one of them a murderer. Still, it may be pointed out, that was a state of things much better than we can show now. The world would count itself happier if, during the Great War, only twenty-five per cent of the population of belligerent lands had been murderers, virtually or in fact. There is something to be gained, and that something is well worth while.

Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.[31] To many of our Undesirables it may seem, mere sentiment to trouble about the ravishing of the world's beauty or the ravaging of the world's humanity. But certain hard facts, even to-day, have to be faced. The process of mechanical invention continues every day on an ever increasing scale of magnitude.

Now that process, however necessary, however beneficial, involves some of the chief evils of our present phase of what we call civilisation, partly because it has deteriorated the quality of all human products and partly because it has enslaved mankind, and in so doing deteriorated also his quality.[32] Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines. But, as the largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his own work; rightly used it may improve it. The greatest task before civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common destruction. It is a task inextricably bound up with the task of moulding the human race for which birth-control is the elected instrument. Indeed they are but two aspects of the same task. We have to accept the rugged fact that every step to render more nearly perfect the mechanical side of life correspondingly abolishes the need for men. Thus it is calculated to-day that whenever, in accordance with a growing tendency, coal is superseded by oil in industry two men are enabled to do the work of twelve. That is merely typical of what is taking place generally in our modern system of civilisation. Everywhere a small number of men are being enabled to replace a large number of men. Not to avoid looking ahead, we may say that of every twelve millions of our population, ten millions will be unwanted. Let them do something else! we cheerfully exclaim. But what?

No doubt there are always art and science, infinite in their possibilities for joy and enlightenment, infinite also, as we know, in their possibilities of mischief and shallowness and boredom. Let it only be true science and great art, and one man is better than ten millions. To say that is only to echo unconsciously the ancient saying of Herac.l.i.tus, "One is ten thousand if he be the best."

[31] Professor E.M. East, a distinguished biologist and lately President of the American Society of Naturalists (_Nature_, 23 Sept., 1920), has estimated that, for all the fall in the birth-rate, the present rate of increase in the population of the world, chiefly of whites, who are increasing most rapidly, will, in the lives of our grandchildren, lead to a struggle for existence more terrible than imagination can conceive.

[32] This has been set forth with admirable lucidity and wealth of ill.u.s.tration by Dr. Austin Freeman in his _Social Decay and Regeneration_ (1921), already mentioned.

The vistas that are opened up when we realise the direction in which the human race is travelling may seem to be endless; and so in a sense they are. Man has replaced the G.o.ds he once dreamed of; he has found that he is himself a G.o.d, who, however realistic he seeks to make his philosophy, himself created the world as he sees it and now has even acquired the power of creating himself, or, rather, of re-creating himself. For he recognises that, at present, he is rather a poor sort of G.o.d, so much an inferior G.o.d that he is hardly, if at all, to be distinguished from the Lords of h.e.l.l.

The divine creative task of man extends into the future far beyond the present, and we cannot too often meditate on the words of the wisest and n.o.blest forerunner of that future: "The whole world still lies before us like a quarry before the master-builder, who is only then worthy of the name when out of this casual ma.s.s of natural material he has embodied with all his best economy, adaptability to the end, and firmness, the image which has arisen in his mind. Everything outside us is only the means for this constructing process, yes, I would even dare to say, also everything inside us; deep within lies the creative force which is able to form what it will, and gives us no rest until, without us or within us, in one or the other way, we have finally given it representation." The future, with all its possibilities, is still a future infinitely far away, however well it may be to fix our eyes on the constellation towards which our solar system may seem to be moving across the sky.

Meanwhile, every well-directed step, while it brings us but ever so little nearer to the far goal around which our dreams may play, is at once a beautiful process and an invigorating effort, and thereby becomes in itself a desirable end. It is the little things of life which give us most satisfaction and the smallest things in our path that may seem most worth while.

THE HERBERT BOOKS BY S. HERBERT, M.D., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.

THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY

"Dr. Herbert's hook can be recommended as a trustworthy 'first aid' in the study of a difficult subject. His style is lucid and concise, and he has provided a glossary which will be of service to many."--_Athenaeum._

"We have only praise for the result."--_Eugenics Review._

"Dr. Herbert will be found a safe guide. He writes as clearly and as simply as may be upon a subject in which it is practically impossible to avoid technical language.... The book may be cordially recommended as admirably adapted for the cla.s.s for whom it is intended." _Westminster Gazette._

THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTION

"The author attempts to examine and test the principles of the theory of evolution as applied to the known phenomena of the cosmos. To do this at all satisfactorily in little more than 300 pages, and at the same time bring under review all that is most valuable in recent scientific research, is no easy task. We may say at once that, in our opinion Dr.

Herbert has succeeded wonderfully well."--_Athenaeum._

"Contains not a single dry page--far and away the most compact and complete account of evolution in all its aspects."--_Globe._

"We congratulate Dr. Herbert on his masterly arrangement.... It will serve as an admirable introduction to a difficult subject."--_Dundee Advertiser._

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF s.e.x

This fills a gap in the literature of s.e.x. It gathers together for the general reader a vast array of facts about s.e.x, mating and reproduction which have never before been so clearly and directly stated.

"For a simple statement, expressed in language as far as possible free from technicalities, of the princ.i.p.al phenomena of generation, Dr.

Herbert's book is the best that we have seen."--_Cambridge Review._

"It is therefore a real satisfaction to find a s.e.x manual which may be placed with confidence in the hands of any educated person.... He has certainly produced the best little manual which we yet possess in this field."--HAVELOCK ELLIS in _Eugenics Review._